By R Rajagopal
“I was a bad teacher. I must explain what this meant in affiliated colleges of the Madras University at the end of the fifties (1950s). We had division strengths of a hundred and twenty, and often two divisions were dovetailed to make a class of two hundred and forty boys, and I was given one such class to teach. I was myself a fresher, and it was my misfortune to meet them for the first time with a line from Wordsworth. I could neither explain it to them, nor make myself heard beyond the first three or four rows. From the great beyond where the toughies had taken position and where my vision blurred, there arose in response to Wordsworth and obscene and amorphous howl.” (O.V. Vijayan (in A Cartoonist Remembers, Rupa & Co.)
I, too, braced for the amorphous howl — inescapable when a meltdown creeps up on you lava-like in the middle of a speech and you are at the wrong end of the microphone.
I knew the words but they would not come out, my voice was cracking and my eyes were welling up. I cannot recall the last time I was at a loss like this.
But I am glad that it happened at Thasrak, the fabled land that became Khasak in Khassakkinte Itihaasam (The Legends of Khasak), the cult novel, serialised in 1968 and published in 1969. Even after 50 reprints, it is still one of the most widely read novels by Malayalis. Vijayan, whose English prose is almost as elegant and breathtaking as his astounding experiments and innovations with the Malayalam language, himself translated the novel into English.
On Tuesday, July 2, I made my first trip to Thasrak, around 330 km from Thiruvananthapuram where I live, on the invitation of the OV Vijayan Samaraka Samiti. That it was my first trip makes this account a big yawn for most Malayalis, because of which I am sending this mostly to my non-Malayali friends. For a Malayali, my account will qualify for an adjective that is spreading like a virus in Kerala to describe avuncular behaviour and pursuits: “cringe-inducing”. Imagine how grating it will be on your nerves if a middle-aged Calcuttan wakes up all of a sudden and dumps on you an account of his visit to Santiniketan! To write about the first visit to Thasrak now is something like. Everybody and his uncle have already been there and done that.
I could not go till now because I had left Kerala in 1990, and the homecoming trips since then were largely governed by the cosmic cycle of births, weddings, ailments and deaths. I should have gone earlier because, like most Malayalis of my age, I was mesmerised by Vijayan.
I discovered Vijayan through cartoons, not the harmless and tickling variety but those drawn with a sledgehammer dipped in pitch-black ink. A sample: The soldier tells the enquirer: “Asking for the TRUTH, lady? Sorry! That’s asking for CLASSIFIED INFORMATION.”
Or this one. Scouts carrying out reconnaissance for revolution-ready land are greeted in India by a leader who shows them an Indian peasant and says in a chain of boxes:
“He can live without electricity….
“…without water or right inside floods…
“on wages paid in unreal money…
“…without FOOD
“He even stages fictitious revolutions!”
The older scout who resembles Mao tells his partner: “SCOOT, boy. This seems to be a country of SUPERMEN.”
On Tuesday, EP Unny, who also lives in Palakkad where Tasrak is located and a worthy successor whose cartooning prose reminds me of Vijayan’s craft, posted a cartoon by Vijayan (probably from the 1980s) to commemorate his birth anniversary. It features the Child (much like Unny’s Calvin), who responds to a court verdict upholding the validity of the NSA (National Security Act) by playing on Tilak’s renowned lines: “Freedom is my birthright and I will have it.” The boy tells his flag-wielding father: “Freedom is my birthright and I will abridge it.”
The child himself is worthy of deep study. Unlike Unny’s Calvin, Vijayan’s child is usually accompanied by his dad. Vijayan once wrote: “My child is real. He sits out there, outside this unreal city (Delhi), below the poverty line (what a sanitised use of language!) in Bihar and Orissa and eastern UP, as his mother feeds him the boiled roots of grass.”
Years later, when I read Ashis Nandy’s foreword to a collection of autobiographical notes by Vijayan, I realised why the cartoonist’s lampooning was so lethal. “His (Vijayan’s) villains are usually real-life persons and clearly identifiable. Yet, there is something unidentifiable in them that makes the viewers feel complicit with the villainy. Indeed, many viewers get the uncanny feeling that they are the actual butt of the cartoonist’s jibes,” Nandy wrote.
I am committing sacrilege after sacrilege. I started out with my first trip to Thasrak and I have strayed far from the novel that became the “before” and “after” milestone in Kerala. Almost everyone of my generation has his or her view on the original Malayalam version of the legends of Khasak. I will not burden you with mine — partly because I am terrified of the backlash from the specialists who have devoted a lifetime to experiencing every nook and corner of the novel and largely because you can read the novel every year and immerse yourself in moments that you were not aware of all these years.
I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Vijayan because he played an unwitting role in Calcutta becoming my adopted home. When I was studying journalism in Delhi in 1990, I had been to his house on Neeti Marg a few times, using reporting as an excuse to meet him. Gurusagaram (The Infinity of Grace), a novel about a journalist covering the Bangladesh War and which has many references to Calcutta, had come out three years earlier and it affected me more than Khasak did.
After the training, I was asked to go to Bangalore, a city I had and have deep reservations about. I stonewalled and went to Lucknow in search of a job. I was running out of cash and I had to make a decision fast. I told Vijayan that I would give up the search for a job in newspapers and work somewhere else in Delhi or Lucknow but won’t go to Bangalore. Very soft-spoken, Vijayan admonished me: “Don’t be a fool. It is a plum job.” I was hearing the fruity noun in this context for the first time.
So, I kept quiet at Daryaganj, where our school was located. Then a miracle happened. My classmate chosen for Calcutta had an offer from a US think-tank and no one wanted to go to the “dying city”. I jumped at the chance and thus began my adventure in Calcutta. The last time I saw Vijayan was when I went to say goodbye to him on the eve of leaving for Calcutta.
This is not to brag that Vijayan was “close” to me or that he had some special affinity towards me or affection for me. More introverted then than now, I hardly spoke. I was mostly the listener. I think Vijayan, who is famously shy, spoke to me because I did not try to impress him or wear him down by asking endless questions about the astonishing characters in his novels and short stories. I regret now that I did not ask him too much about his cartoons (actually, only much later did I realise the real power and utility of cartoons when every other tool of journalism fails.) His house was a port of call for all Malayalis who went to Delhi in the 1970s till the early 1990s. I am sure that he treated everyone with the same civility that I was fortunate to have received, and spoke to them about his beloved cat.
At Thasrak on Tuesday, I was called to speak at one of the sessions at the OV Vijayan Smaraka Mandiram to mark the birth anniversary of Vijayan who passed away in 2005. I was speaking on “excess power and the works of Vijayan” — an uncanny coincidence on the calendar as the new criminal laws had kicked in only a day earlier.
As I said at the outset, I choked when I was speaking about Umar Khalid and Siddique Kappan.
Vijayan had written a haunting story, titled After The Hanging, that describes the journey of Vellayi-appan to see his condemned son before the boy, Kandunni, is hanged for a murder he has no memory of committing. The story is about how helpless the dispossessed and the marginalised are before the systems of power that work only for those with resources.
The prose is searing. “Slung over his (Vellayi-appan’s) shoulder was a bundle of cooked rice, and its wet seeped through the threadbare cloth into his arm. His wife had bent long over the rice, kneading it for the journey, and she had cried the while, her tears had soaked the sour curd.”
At the jail, “father and son stood facing each other, petrified. Then Vellayi-appan leaned forward to take his son in an embrace. From Kandunni came a cry that pierced beyond hearing, and when it died down, Vellayi-appan said, ‘My son!’
‘Father!’ said Kandunni.
“Just these words but in them, father and son communed in the fullness of sorrow.”
The next morning, after the hanging: “After the last shovelful of earth had levelled the pit, Vellayi-appan wandered in the gathering heat and eventually came to the beach. He had never seen the ocean before. Then he became aware of something cold and wet in his hands, the rice his wife had kneaded for the journey. Vellayi-appan undid the bundle. He scattered the rice on the sand, in sacrifice and in requiescat.
“From the crystal reaches of the sunlight, crows descended on the rice, like incarnate souls of the dead come to receive the offering.”
Written in the 1980s, After the Hanging recalls the excesses of the Emergency. It can be set in contemporary India too. Touching upon the parallels, I spoke of Khalid and Kappan.
I asked the audience if they thought about Khalid and his father and mother, about Kappan and his family.
I recalled how Khalid, heading so deliberately and purposefully from Calcutta towards certain incarceration in New Delhi in 2020, wanted to taste chicken before he left the eastern city. I also recalled reading about Kappan thinking of his mother while taking his first bath in 22 days in a jail in Uttar Pradesh and wanting to weep, remembering how his umma used to scrub his back with coconut fibre.
“O, Almighty, please do not let my umma, wife and children be humiliated because of me,” Kappan would pray.
I recall Vellayi-appan meeting his creditor, Kuttihassan, on the way to the jail to meet his son. In silence, lament and consolation.
Kuttihassan’s unspoken words to Vellayi-appan: “We consign our unredeemed debts to God’s keeping. Let His will be done.
“May the Prophet guard you on this journey, may the gods bless you, your gods and mine.”
I cannot forget that although Kappan was allowed to meet his mother briefly, she was no more when he was eventually released on bail.
I could not say all these words (what I have reproduced above is from the book I found on a non-profit site called Internet Archive). I said I could not read about Khalid and Kappan without choking up — and then it happened right in front of the audience. I lost my voice.
I did not know what to do. A kind soul offered me a glass of water. I did not have the presence of mind to take a sip, which probably would have helped clear my throat and carry on. Eventually, I did continue.
Unlike the toughies in the back at Vijayan’s Class of the 1950s, the audience at Thasrak, who had been treated to at least two brilliant lectures in the previous sessions, was merciful enough not to boo or howl me off the stage.
I don’t know if their kindness sprang from the memory of Vijayan’s well-documented misadventure as a teacher or whether they were thinking of Khalid and Kappan and, like me, feeling “complicit in the villainy” as Nandy wrote about the viewers of Vijayan’s crushing cartoons.
***
Yawn. Narcissism is NEVER interesting to read about.